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Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Really, all I want to write is ‘this book is so brilliantly
written and the story is so great go and get a copy now’ but I’ll try to be a
little more forthcoming. It’s not easy though, because I know that nothing I
can say will match up to how much I enjoyed reading Red Moon. And not only that, but it addresses huge social and
political issues in the guise of an all-action butt-kicking werewolf story. Yeah,
take that, genre vs. literary fiction argument – I just read a book that talks
about serious stuff and has lycans in it.

The lycans in Red Moon
are not the supernatural kind, rather they are humans infected with a specific
disease that crossed over from infected wolves centuries ago. It is the same
class of disease as Mad Cow Disease; the medical details are carefully laid out
in the novel, giving it an authenticity that I loved. Drugs have been developed
to control the effects, pacifying and neutralising the wolf within. In the USA
it is compulsory to take the medicine, lycans are forbidden from changing into
their wolf-selves. Unsurprisingly not everyone is content with this state of
affairs, and the book opens with a shocking act of terrorism. This announces
the beginning of a renewed struggle against repression. It also stimulates the
anti-lycan agenda.

America is already deeply mired in lycan politics, as the military presence in the Lycan
Republic. This territory in the frozen landscape between Finland and Russia is
supposed to be a homeland for those that want to be all of themselves, wolf
included. The discovery of uranium in the region altered things, and the US
military are the guardians of the area. Military intervention tied to economic
gain is so overtly cynical here that a resistance movement feels inevitable.
Bringing the fight to American soil raises the stakes, and the fall-out is not
going to be pretty.

The main characters in the story come from all sides of the
arguments. Claire wants nothing than more than to escape her parents and
hometown for something more exciting. Caught up in the government clampdown
post-terrorist attack she finds herself cut loose from everything she’s known;
be careful what you wish for. Patrick has seen the fury of the resistance
movement at first hand and has a father serving in the Republic, a prime
candidate for the anti-lycan group active at his school. Miriam is trying to
remain ex-resistance despite the aggressive persuasion of her nemesis Puck.
Chase is a hale and hearty politician making his way to the White House with
his outspoken policies. The Tall Man is a creepy presence, stalking Claire for
her family connections. And there are more, shadowy players stirring the
bubbling pot. Peel back the layers of paranoia and conspiracy and you’ll find
something even worse than you originally thought.

There’s nothing simplistic about the way the story is
constructed. Right and wrong are shades of grey here, and the ramifications of
decisions play out across the whole book. It’s clever and marvellous, it’s
violent, visceral, and unrelenting. I didn’t want it end and I had to know what
was going to happen next. And the epilogue is a work of evil genius in its own
right. I loved Red Moon with a passion
far beyond my expectations. Read it now, before it gets made into an HBO series
(someone please make that happen).

I had a proof copy of Red
Moon from my Waterstones bookselling days, thank you lovely Hodder peeps. It
is out now Hardback.

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!